GIFS.com does exactly what the title suggests: it creates animated GIFs from videos. The free option allows you to convert a YouTube video or extract into a GIF and add your own captions. You can choose to download the result (for instance, to share it via social networks) or to embed it directly into your website as shown below (in passing, a hat tip to our CEO at Dialog Solutions S.A, the publisher of Dialogfeed, Laurent Mayer, who knows the score ;) )

Laurent Mayer, Dialogfeed

The paid version of GIFS.com also allows you to upload your own videos to convert them to GIFs.

This website is nothing to look at, but it does provide a major advantage when it comes to managing uploaded videos. You can search your documents on your own computer or your Google Drive. Personally, I would recommend against the second option for security reasons: avoid connecting your Google accounts to any third party solutions as much as possible.

GIF Brewery goes beyond simple video capture and conversion. It does have the “small” disadvantage of being a chargeable service (at €4.99 it really is a “small” disadvantage), but that’s countered by the massive advantage of being completely comprehensive: for instance, it allows videos and .png files to be converted, the video frame can be cropped or resized, you can apply filters, and save drafts.
It’s only available for Mac however.

Create your own GIFs from images

One of the biggest advantages that GIFs have is their ability to support all media types. That makes them extremely useful from a picture marketingperspective.

An image or a GIF can say a lot more than a wordy explanation. I’d like to show you this:

… (I’m not sure my boss is still with me on this…)

Whether or not you share my late-night humor, you have to admit that promoting this type of content on your social networks or in your articles adds real value as long as you use your imagination a little.

There are a number of tools available, and I personally used ezgif(which is very configurable) to produce the GIF shown above.

GIF creation tools in screenshot mode.

To finish the article, I wanted to raise how useful GIFs can be when looking to educate and inform.

I regularly show this instead of giving a speech:

Tutoriel absolument désinteressé

(You will by now have worked out that if you want to test a Dialogfeed Social Wall, I won’t object!)

The three tools that I suggest for this type of usage are available to download for use on the desktop:

Obviously this article isn’t an exhaustive discussion of all the GIF creation tools out there, and it doesn’t try to be, nor does it cover everything that GIFs can be used for. Nonetheless, I hope I’ve given you a few things to get you thinking. If you have any other thoughts, I’d be delighted if you’d share them, and I will be happy to add anything that I’ve left out if needed!

That said, you’re going to need guidance to help you post your precious GIFs on social networks: so here’s a completely shameless teaser to plug an article that we’ll be providing shortly!

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